I’m fascinated by the way you manage to invoke the infamous Jersey turnpike with ecumenical language. Take the opening lines of the first stanza:

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Three miles off the interstate is whateverHeaven might be to those who dreamOf a better return.

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Already we’ve got a dangling-carrot sense of transcendence and Second Coming. It reminds me of a few lines in your 2010 poem “Private Equity”:

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Everyone wants beyond; even with the one last pageAs exit plan it is the return that is watched and how

We will be known.

Did you write the first drafts of these poems around the same time? Or did the logic-parsing of “Private Equity” fire up the synapses and set a thought process in motion that later generated “Somewhere in New Jersey”?

The two poems come from a cycle of work begun in 2007, before the financial downturn, when I began to overhear the media speaking of terms like “derivative markets,” “credit default swaps,” and “hedge strategies.” Such intentional language and heady-sounding ideas, which then got me chasing down the larger meanings behind the nomenclature of Capital, Margin, Risk, Return.

This world of finance fascinated me; I began with the image of leverage, of how man could manipulate such large obstacles, desire even, with small calculations. Concepts like private equity, risk management, high-frequency trading—all opened into poems trying to explore what lies behind the curtain of the powerful few. And the language of that world, and of those who rule, or think they rule (or how we let them rule), reminds much of how we use Church.

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Both these poems appeal to an element of the American psyche that stretches back to Plymouth Rock: I stake a claim in my land, defend it, grow it, and thereby steer my own destiny. It’s basic, bold tenet of the American Dream: venture capital and real estate are means for spiritual exploration and existential validation.

But “Somewhere in New Jersey” and “Private Equity” feel marked by the housing crisis and recession; there’s vigor, angst, caution in your tone. Things are dubiously “declared everlasting / By brick laid in a pasture gone fallow,” and as the poem progresses the language becomes less spiritual and more transactional, mechanical.

Were these poems informed by the 2008 bubble bust? Or was your investigation of American property-holding sparked by some earlier puzzlement?

The bubble that burst was not just financial, but one that was built out of mystery. And its undoing led us nowhere, save back to our own weaknesses. No blame could really land outside of our own greed and the idea of more, more, more.

Stretching from those first European steps we have presumed much about our limits, our unlimitedness. Resources, equity, geography. Hubris and amnesia moving hand in hand over each frontier. We see ourselves as creators even if only with an option or idea; we act deserving before we have ever earned. I think this creed of “credit” as one of the most frightening admonitions to came out of 2008.

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Both poems share in their meditation on the Ouroboros logic of investment and interest. In “Somewhere in New Jersey,” you say:

...This, the place money built

So money can build. Payment begins,Which is how you go in, until you forgetThe name of the agency that brought you here,

Any point of reference lost enoughThat value appears everywhere.

This seems to echo the lines in “Private Equity:”

…To measureEverything out until the one who takes over

Becomes taken. This as strategy, the artOf how we build until managementIn turn builds us, elegant the logic

Used.

In a way, the reader is made to feel that the act of squirreling away savings is inherently consuming. It’s as if neither the spendthrift grasshopper nor the stockpiling ant of La Fontaine’s fable can exist. This strikes me as both ironic and unsettling.

Do you find humor in the logic of investment, or are you disconcerted by it? What do you intend your readers to feel, or think about?

At the time I was re-studying philosophy and theology, and saw the same threads running through the abstractions and juxtapositions. How do we deal with futility, the structures that we have ultimately made, and the positions we think ourselves in as regards these structures.

This notion of something more, something better: where does it come from? Is this uniquely American? Human? If, as we have more we want more, when do we run out? Will we ever? When you think of yourself as student of the natural world, you run up against the question of what exactly is the un-natural—how do you take yourself out of the strategy enough to see?

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The last line of “Private Equity” emphasizes the self-delusions of progress that the stock exchange offers its investors: “To end up where we start / Again, and to look as if we gained.” Yet the ending of “Somewhere in New Jersey” retains a sense of reach and possibility, that the ideals of the American Dream may indeed be hovering just over the horizon:

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…WhatCan be made with just one push: this work of wanting

More than the actual. To watch yourselfMove in and out of all that truthAnd beauty—to be in debt is to remain awake.

This strikes me as a celebration of the quixotic: Americans (in the tradition of Gatsby and the green light glowing opposite his mansion) pursue unattainable goals. The struggle, the yearning, lends meaning to their life.

There seems some parallel between the concept that increase, whether it be access to reading, writing, technology, or investment pools, entitles one to ultimate success. But any shortcut (by the powerful), or endeavor of actual work (by the powerless), is resented by either side, and becomes a deterrent to full responsibility. The divine right of those in the closed old-boy networks is supposed to be giving way to all possibility, but what has been left by the wayside is the idea that the early American ethic came from work being done first for “God’s approval,” beyond the individual, for some larger purpose.

As with sex, perhaps, we are, in certain ways, reluctant to talk about the machinations of finance, for fear of dispelling some mystery—believing that mystery is actually part of the transaction, much like the idea of how we want capitalism on the way up, and socialism on the way down. We are O.K. with the shrouded during bliss, but when we have to work on it we don’t do well with the accounting and recounting.

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Do you believe that shooting for the moon hones your gratitude and encourages you to “remain awake”?

I think the trick has been that this is exactly how to survive: you convince yourself that you need to win and that you will win.

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How does the quixotic translate to your writing process? Do you feel that an ideal version of a poem is waiting beyond the horizon when you start a rough draft?

For me, the act of writing comes out of query. Each image turns to the next with its question and gets answered. Or with its answer it gets questioned. Poetry is my way to understand what is difficult. How one thing can be explained through another—is to get closer, to unhide what feels hidden.

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Do you grapple with fully realizing your vision of a poem? If you’ve ever hit a wall with your writing, would you say it’s honed your gratitude or forced you into a new level of wakefulness?

The hardest part for me is to let the poem go where it wants to go. Which means no expectations. If to “get” more is to stay awake, and vice versa, it becomes a feedback loop: you are awake, you talk yourself into wanting, with no room to question how you came to be here. And this is how we enter and finish well, by convincing ourselves that there will be some end that we will honor, grow to justify. No matter what. Therein lies the gratitude: to love even the mystery.

Photograph by Marion Ettlinger/Corbis.

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